Tag Archives: Bottle

I was looking at pill bottles the other day. You know, the little round ones the pharmacists put your medications in.
It wasn’t the bottles themselves that first caught my attention, it was the labels that are stuck on with cement and cannot be removed with heat, water or a force of nature. It occurred to me that when man is done with life on this planet, when all other plastic finally disintegrates, those little brown bottles with a two inch piece of paper stuck to them will still be floating around.

The worst of it is the private information that cannot be destroyed; your name, your medication, your doctor. You can shred your mail to keep information private but your life sustaining secrets cannot be destroyed.

So that got me thinking about reusing those little brown bottles. Why can’t they be reused? Why do we have to throw them out after one use? It strikes me that it is a waste to the millionth degree.

Just stop to think about how many bottles we are talking about. I have one prescription a month, a minor medication but a necessary one. So for me that is twelve wasted bottles a year and in the last fifteen years there are 180. That still may not seem like much to you, but I did an informal survey among my friends and acquaintances and the people that I know get three to eight bottles filled a month. Never mind the exorbitant cost of the medication itself, just think about the container cost.

Now I bet that if all these wee bottles were recycled and reused we could save money on the over all cost. And if for some reason these particular bottles cannot be reused then surely there are some bright bunnies out there that could design a reusable bottle.

The fact that I can use a permanent marker to obliterate personal information is of no consequence. Somebody must be able to explain why the waste, why the clutter?